


Riptide

by commoncomitatus



Series: XIX [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 21:06:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2666381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following the events of "Sacrifice", Laurel contemplates the last six years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Riptide

—

She doesn’t have a problem.

Problems are messy things. They’re unpleasant and self-destructive, and they bring out the worst in people. Problems are all about diffused responsibility and misplaced blame, excuses and arguments and violence; having a problem is throwing out pain in all directions and not caring who it hits, not caring who it hurts. Simply put, problems are _problematic_ , and Laurel Lance is just about self-aware enough to know that that’s not what she wants for herself. At the very least, it’s definitely not what she wants for the people she loves.

Loss is nothing new to the Lance family. They’ve lost a hell of a lot in the last six years, and if recent events are anything to go by, that’s not about to change any time soon. It doesn’t matter where they hide, how hard they work, what they do, it always finds them; time after time, it hits, and you’d think she’d be used to it by now, but maybe she’s not as strong or as brave as she likes to pretend she is, because she never does. She never gets used to it, and it doesn’t matter how many times she tries to convince herself it’s better her than someone else, that doesn’t ease the pain when it’s turning her inside-out.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair that it’s always her family, that it’s always _her_. It’s not fair, and it’s sure as hell not right, but if all this loss has taught her anything, it’s that ‘right’ and ‘fair’ don’t mean a damn thing.

It started with Sara.

Of course it did; most things in their family start with her, one way or another. It’s not that she’s a troublemaker, exactly; it’s just that trouble has a nasty habit of showing up whenever she’s around. It’s always been that way, for at least as long as Laurel can remember, and that didn’t really changed once she died. It was naive, really, to think that it might, but old habits die hard and naiveté has always been a particular vice of Laurel’s.

She’s tried to make peace with it, with Sara; she’d hoped it would be easier without her around to undercut all the progress they might have made. She’d hoped it would be easy to find closure with a sister who isn’t there to screw her over any more. She just would be easy, thought it would be _possible_ , she really did, but it’s not. And maybe that’s her fault; it can’t be Sara’s, not any more, so she supposes it has to be.

Truth be told, she’s always been a bit too much like her father. He’s stubborn, too, even when he shouldn’t be, and for as long as she’s known him he’s never been able to let things go. There’s more than a little of that stubbornness in Laurel too, more than there ever was in her sister. It’s always been there, even back when things were innocent between them. It was there in the way she could never quite turn her back on the crawling little thing that was always underfoot. It was there in the way she clenched her teeth and forced down retaliation after retaliation every time her precocious little brat of a sister tried to get a rise out of her. She tried to ignore the things Sara did, the things she said, the trouble that followed her about like a lost puppy; she tried, but age and experience are cruel and unyielding parents, and it got a whole lot harder to keep her teeth clenched when precociousness turned to rebellion and straight-out bitchery.

Laurel is stubborn, but Sara is wilful ( _was_ wilful, she reminds herself for the thousand times, because even after six years it’s so hard not to think of Sara in the present tense), and hers is the kind of wilfulness that hurts other people.

Sara always did take after Mom, so much more than Dad.

It shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, then, that Mom was the next to leave. Just like Sara, just like her wilful little sister, she took off without a thought for those she left behind, the lives she wrecked by saving her own. Looking back now, Laurel supposes she should have seen it coming; they’re so alike, the two of them, with that tendency to wreak havoc wherever they go, the way they have of finding the most destructive way to do what they want. The Lance family has always been a lit fuse, and of course Mom was the one to throw kerosene over it, the one to set off the explosion. Of course she was; just like Sara, explosions follow her wherever she goes, and it took more than a few years to clean up the mess she left behind.

Honestly, Laurel’s still mad at her for that. Walking out when they needed her, leaving them, leaving _her_. Dad’s spiral into oblivion was no secret to anyone who knew him, but Laurel was the only one who stuck around to see it. She was the one who had to watch, who had to stand there and see it happen, helpless and hopeless. She’d lost just as much as he had, just as much as Mom had, more than both of them, but she was the one who had to be strong, who had to be brave, who had to take care of poor Dad because he was the one who couldn’t cope. And apparently Mom couldn’t cope either, because where the hell was she while Laurel was losing her father to his bottle? Where the hell was she? 

Nowhere to be seen, like always.

At least in theory, Laurel gets it. The need to put some space between her and Dad, to leave the home that held so many painful memories, the childhood bed that smelled like Sara, the trinkets and toys she couldn’t throw away. She gets the urge, she really does, but it’s hard to feel sympathy for a mother who ran away when she never had that luxury herself. Was it really so damn difficult to stick around for the sake of the one daughter she had left? Isn’t that what a mother’s supposed to do?

Apparently not, because she didn’t stick around. Of course she didn’t. She left, just like Sara left with Oliver on that stupid boat, just like she ran off and got herself killed. They both ran off, both screwed her over and left her alone, only Mom didn’t have the decency to die. She didn’t have the kindness, the compassion, to get lost at sea, to drown and disappear for good. She’s always there, except she’s not, running off to Central City and hiding in plain sight, just close enough to be a permanent reminder of how she’s not really _there_ at all. Phone-calls, emails, birthday cards, and what the hell was Laurel supposed to do with stupid little things like that when Sara was drowned and Dad was drowning and Laurel was all alone on dry land?

Dad, at least, stuck around, but there were times when she couldn’t help thinking it was only because he was too damn drunk to find his keys. It wasn’t just his sorrows he was drowning; by the end of it, he was drowning every part of him left alive. She watched him from her own safe distance, watched time after time as he imploded and self-destructed, watched as he sank deeper and deeper into despair and depression and drink, deeper into all those things she wasn’t enough to save him from. Sometimes she thought about saying something, about being the responsible one, staging an intervention or something, but what good would it do? One person isn’t much of an army, and it’s not so easy to save a world that doesn’t want to be saved.

Besides, it’s not like he would’ve listened to her even if she’d tried. He was angry, upset, and God knows Laurel understood those feelings all too well. They both buried themselves in work, he with the cops and her with legal aid, but when she went home to her empty apartment and her empty thoughts, he went home to another bottle or another six-pack, another shot of whatever the hell he could find. Emptiness has always sat naturally with Laurel; after Ollie and Sara, after Mom, she’d started to think it was all she deserved, but it never quite fit her father so well. He was the family man, the kind of guy who thrived best surrounded by the people he loved, and when those people were taken away, one by one, so quickly, it ate him alive with ruthless efficiency. He had no idea how to handle loneliness; he never had to before, and he didn’t know how to cope.

In hindsight, Laurel supposes she should have been better. It’s not much, and it doesn’t help anyone to look back on those things and see now all the things she should’ve done — too little, too late, and hasn’t that always been her own personal slogan? — but at least she knows it now. At least she understands where he was coming from, how he was thinking and feeling, why he did the things he did. She understands now, at least a little better, how seductive it is to find something that stops all those feelings even for an hour or two, and when she thinks back on those dark days of driving him home and keeping him alive, when she looks back and waits for the old resentment to surface, nothing does.

He had a problem. With the drinking, sure, but with more than that. Loss is no stranger to him, no stranger to either of them, but some people handle it better than others and Dad was never the strong one in the Lance family.

That was Mom. The strong one, the smart one, the one who could cope with anything. Reasonable, rational, resilient, that was Mom. Quiet, thoughtful, a logical thinker; she was the one who held them all together, who could cure any hurt, smiling around a mouthful of carefully-chosen words, soothing every bad thing that came their way. She was the one who always knew what to do, who had the band-aids at the ready when Laurel skinned her knee for the first time, who knew what to say when Sara was too scared to try and ride her bike without the safety of its training wheels, who could always sense when her husband had a bad day at work. She could handle any crisis, any situation, could do anything. She was their rock, all of them, holding their family together for at least as long as Laurel can remember. Honestly, it shouldn’t have been surprised either one of them that Dad forgot how to function as soon as she wasn’t around to show him how.

But then, she’s just like him, isn’t she? Mom and Sara are the smart ones, wilful and focused, the ones who don’t let life break them. Laurel and Dad, they’re the headstrong ones, the angry ones, the ones who seek answers to hard questions, who trust the law, trust justice, put their faith in things that are bigger and stronger than they are. They’re the ones that hurt the most when the things they trust betray them.

Laurel gets why Dad fell so hard. She gets why he took the road he took. She got it back then, too, but it was harder to admit to herself, much less to him. She was just as messed up as he was, just as confused and angry, just as ready to give up on everyone and everything. She felt just like he did, but maybe there’s a little bit of Mom in her after all because she picked a smarter road, a safer one; she had vices too, just like Dad, but hers were clean and stable. Dad hit the bottle, but Laurel hit the books, drinking down facts to arm herself with instead of poison to drown in. Law school, legal aid, work and work and work. It kept her sane, kept her sober, kept her straight… but more importantly it kept her from thinking. It kept her separate from him.

Dad wasn’t so lucky, and that wasn’t entirely his fault. Laurel could hide behind the law, behind justice, behind all the things he’d taught her to believe in because she was young and naive and law school made it all look so pretty. Dad was already out there, though, already living that life, and his work wasn’t like hers; it was violence and anger, drunks and drug addicts. His days were spent surrounded by the kind of people he should have been avoiding, the kind of people who put bad ideas into the heads of people who shouldn’t be thinking.

Quentin Lance is nothing like his ex-wife; he doesn’t know how to turn his thoughts to paper, doesn’t know how to transform what he’s feeling into something that might help someone else, doesn’t know how to use words instead of weapons. All he knows how to do is point a gun, put a guy in a prison cell, watch him sweat out his withdrawal until he can answer a question; all he knows how to do is be a cop. He doesn’t know how to be patient, how to study, how to make something positive out of something so terrible, and he sure as hell doesn’t know how to take a deep breath and slam on the brakes before he makes a mistake. He’ll drive himself off a cliff before he’ll stop to realise there might be another way, and by then of course it’s too late.

And maybe that’s part of Laurel’s problem right now too. Maybe it just took a little more for her to get there. A little more time, a little more distance, a little more loss. Everyone has their breaking point; maybe hers was just a little further down the line than his.

She’s so much like him, in so many ways. Inheriting her mother’s love for books doesn’t stand for much next to all the angry feelings she got from him. She sees the world the way he does, good and bad, plain and simple; she puts things together the way he does, thinks in the same shades of black and white, trusts in justice and the law the same way that he does, absolutely and completely. They have the same kind of faith, hard as steel but prone to bend if you put enough heat on it, and maybe it really is just that she needs a little more heat than he does, because she can see his path laid out before her now just as clearly as he must have seen it himself when he was the one feeling this way, when he was the one facing the emptiness, the grief, the anger that won’t be tempered.

Losing Sara was like a kind of purgatory. For a very long time, Laurel didn’t know how to feel, didn’t know how to reconcile all the things she wanted to. She was so angry, but not in a productive way, and it was so easy to blame them both, Sara and Oliver, that there wasn’t any room to process darker feelings like grief and loneliness. There was too much rage, too much injustice, and for the longest time she just hated. She hated Sara for running off with her boyfriend, hated Oliver for giving in to her sister’s charms, hated them both for getting on that boat when it should have been her. She’s not quite the kind of masochist who’d wish for her own death — at least not most of the time — but she’s just enough of one to realise that there’s a kind of twisted irony to the whole situation, and every breath she took for those first few months was a permanent reminder that she’s the one who should have drowned, that Sara’s the one who should have survived, who should have lived to grieve and mourn and move on with her life, that she’s the one who should have had her who life ahead of her.

Sara should have survived, but she didn’t, and Laurel hated her for that. She hated her because she got to run away and hide, got to disappear and never see the consequences of her selfishness. But isn’t that always the way? Sara, who always got everything. Sara, who never had to suffer a day in her life, and now she never will. Lying cheating Sara gets to die, and poor betrayed Laurel has to live with that.

Poor betrayed Laurel. Lost her boyfriend, lost her sister, then found out that she would have lost them both to each other anyway. Poor stupid, naive Laurel.

Sara had it easy, she thinks. Dying is so much easier than getting left behind to clean up the mess.

—

It should’ve gotten better with time, but it didn’t.

Time is supposed to be the greatest healer, the thing that cures all wounds. It’s supposed to dull the ache, make the distance a little easier to bear, the loss a little less lonely. It’s supposed to fill up the emptiness with new things, or at least offer new ways of looking at old things. It’s supposed to be about burying the ghosts of the past and leaving them in the dust and the dirt where they belong. It’s supposed to be about _healing_ , but it’s hard to do that when the past won’t stay buried and the present feels like hell.

It took five years for things to just look like they might get better. Five long, exhausting, nightmare-filled years. A dead boyfriend and a dead sister, a disappearing mother and a drowning father. A whole family wiped out by one disaster, and just when she finally let herself believe that things might slowly but surely be getting better, just when she was finally able to look at her reflection in the mirror again, Oliver Queen walked back into her life.

It wasn’t exactly the miracle Laurel had been hoping for all those years. It wasn’t the kind of miracle she’d dreamed of every night, waking tear-stained and angry again and again and again. She dreamed of a convenient undo, a world where her mother didn’t leave, her father didn’t drink, and her little sister didn’t run off with her boyfriend, a world where she could pick herself up from a loss that didn’t shake so many corners of her world. A dead boyfriend, she could endure; it would hurt, and she would grieve, but the grief would pass with time and the support of her family. If it was just Oliver, she might stand a chance.

But it wasn’t. It was Sara, too. Her little sister, her parents’ baby girl. _Sara_ , and what kind of miracle leaves someone like Sara dead while Oliver gets to come back? What the hell kind of twisted miracle does that?

It didn’t feel like a miracle at all. Truth be told, it felt more like a cruel joke, like the world was mocking her, mocking _them_ , her and her dad and everything they’d been through together. It is their hard work over the last five years added up to nothing, all those AA meetings, all those exams that landed her a job at CNRI, all the little accomplishments they managed between them; they all disappeared in a heartbeat the second she saw that pretty-boy smile pasted all over the television. She’d thought she knew anger before; when the two of them ran off together, when their reckless cheating got them both killed and left her to pick up the pieces of the heart they tore apart. She thought that was anger, but it wasn’t. Not like this.

And maybe that’s just one more of the countless ways that she’s more like her father than her mother. If Mom had stuck around for more than five minutes, maybe she would’ve found something positive to say, something positive and promise-filled in the idea that Oliver was alive. _“At least someone is,”_ she’d say, or _“heaven knows, Moira deserves some happiness after what she’s been through.”_ That’s Mom all over, optimism and hope and allowing herself the luxury of being happy for other people. She’s always seeing the bigger picture, focusing on all the stupid little things that don’t matter. And maybe it would’ve helped a bit to hear her say those things, to feel just a sliver of her cock-eyed optimism. Maybe it wouldn’t have helped at all; maybe Laurel’s own stubbornness would have trumped even that, but even if it did, at least she would’ve had something to respond to. At least Mom would have said something, done something, _felt_ something. Dad just stared at the wall for a few minutes, and ran away to another AA meeting.

That made her angry too, in a way that the drinking never did. It’s only now, too many years later, that she realises how screwed-up that is, how twisted that his problem didn’t hurt nearly as much as his recovery did. Laurel didn’t care how much he drank, didn’t care how completely he imploded, how absolute his self-destruction; in a horrible, selfish sort of way, it made her feel better about herself. As long as he was the one spiralling out of control, as long as he was the one who needed help, she had to be the one to provide it. At the beginning, it was a blessing; helping him helped her too, and watching him implode kept her from doing the same. But it’s not so easy to play the hero when the one who needed saving before doesn’t need it any more, and Dad’s sobriety wasn’t nearly as good for his daughter as his drinking had been.

Her problems, such as they were, weren’t the kind to be solved by a couple of meetings and a few cups of coffee; angry and bitter and filled with hurt as she was, she had to look further afield for a way to keep herself numb.

Tommy Merlyn had served her well before. Twice or three times, they both lost count; it was easy with him after Oliver’s death, and it was just as easy after he came back to life. They’d never really seen eye-to-eye, Laurel and Tommy, at least not when Oliver was between them; he was the playboy bad influence and she was the stuck-up girlfriend. From her perspective, he was trying to lead Oliver down a road of sin, and from his she was trying to suck the fun out of every little thing his best friend did. When he was talking Ollie into spending his nights partying and getting high, she was picking out china patterns; she’d been planning their wedding almost from their first date, and she wasn’t about to loosen the collar just to play nice with her ego-crazed frat buddy. It was an age-old struggle, best friend against girlfriend, and one that had amused Oliver to no end; he loved conflict, and all the more so when he was at the centre of it. There were few things he loved more than watching people fighting over him, and they both played up perfectly to his attention-whoring.

In hindsight, she can’t deny that there was probably some element of revenge in the way she fell into bed with Tommy, the way she used his body to wash away memories of Oliver’s. It was all about him, all about Oliver, about doing to him what he’d done to her with Sara. At least for the first few times, it was all laid out in black and white. Back when things were simple, when her pain was plain, when Oliver and Sara were both dead and he was to blame for everything, when he’d taken her sister away from her, not just for a quick fling but forever. She was so angry, so hateful, and there was something sordidly satisfying in working out those frustrations between the sheets with his erstwhile best friend. They’d clashed so hard and so frequently back when he was alive, Oliver had always joked that Tommy was the only guy he could trust not to try anything with her. It was so simple, so easy; they hated each other, and that made them safe. Remembering that, of course, just made it all the sweeter when he was dead and everything changed.

Tommy was a rebound thing at first, a quick and easy way of getting her anger out while she processed everything, Oliver’s death and Sara’s, their mutual deception, her parents’ divorce, her father’s drinking, the nightmare her life had become and the loneliness it brought with it. It was strange, just how solid someone like Tommy Merlyn could be when the rest of her world was so shaken, how strong and steady the one-time playboy could be when it really mattered. He rocked her world a few times, and she rocked his in turn, and that was all it was. A couple of hours every now and then, little moments of clarity where it was okay to be angry, to feel lost and lonely and broken. A safe space where it was okay to resent Oliver so much more than she missed him, where it was okay because Tommy resented him a little too, where it was okay that neither of them could deal with their feelings, okay that they didn’t even really know what those feelings were.

What they did know, both of them, was that those feelings were a whole lot less confusing when they were riding them out together, when he was in her bed or she was in his, when their anger was drumming out rhythm against ribs or gouging marks in shoulders or backs, when they were turning the pain into something better, something that felt good. It might not have been healthy, but nothing was healthy just then; nothing about Sara’s death was healthy, nothing about Oliver’s either, and while Dad was drowning himself in the bottle, what was the harm if Laurel let herself drown just a little in something a whole lot safer?

She thought it would change after Oliver got back, after he wasn’t dead any more, after the anger turned into something more solid, something she could touch and see and burn her fingers on. Five years and five hundred AA meetings had changed her father, made him stronger; he’d come to terms with what had happened, with Oliver’s part in it, with the treachery that never really affected him in the first place. He’d cleaned up, sobered up, put his life back together again, and those damned meetings kept him from losing his temper the way he should have, the way Laurel expected him to, the way she thought she wanted him to.

But then, maybe she’d changed a little too. Maybe those little lapses with Tommy were better therapy than she’d thought at the time, because forgiving Oliver came more easily than she expected to her as well. When it came down to it, when he was standing there in front of her, looking at her with those big eyes, bright and beautiful as the ones she fell in love with but just a little darker now, older and cut a little rougher… when it all came down, it was so much easier than she ever imagined to say that it was okay, to nod and smile and turn around, to make peace with him if not with Sara, to accept the past for what it was and walk away with her head held high. She wanted to be angry, wanted to let out all that violence that had seethed and festered inside of her for five long years, the self-destruction she’d put off while her father needed it, the anger she’d gouged into Tommy’s shoulders, the rage seared against her ribs. She wanted to tell him exactly how much hell he’d put her through, put everyone through, but that first inevitable explosion there was nothing left to throw at him. One explosion, one quick outburst, and suddenly it didn’t seem so terrible.

It was probably inevitable, then, that she’d fall back into old habits with Tommy, if only just to remember what it was like when she knew how to hate.

Less inevitable, of course, is how it happened. Or maybe that’s just her own blithe stupidity again, her father’s influence clouding her judgement. Tommy Merlyn was never the safe guy, the loyal guy, the plan-your-life-with guy; he wasn’t even the reformable bad boy, not like Ollie. Tommy was just the rebound guy, the last living link with the man she’d thought she lost, the bad-idea-after-a-few-too-many-cocktails guy, and when Oliver swung back into town like he’d never been gone at all, Laurel naturally assumed that she and Tommy would be through for good too, that Oliver’s bright eyes and charming smile would make things awkward, remind them of all the wrong reasons for what they did, and turn the flush of passion into blushes of shame.

It didn’t happen that way, though. Laurel wasn’t the only one to change in those five years, and she wasn’t the only one to grow up a little either. The young man who wooed her, the rich kid who threw elaborate fundraisers just to get her attention, the puppy-faced boy who lost everything… it was all Tommy Merlyn, but it was a Tommy Merlyn she’d never seen before. It was a new Tommy, a dozen new Tommys, and she was as helpless against his eyes as she’d ever been against Oliver’s. It was a new feeling, a new romance, and at least for a little while, it was everything she never knew she needed.

Good things never last, though, do they? Not for Lances, anyway.

Oliver was always the crack in her armour, even way back when she didn’t wear any, when she didn’t need any, in those blissful old days when armour was something her father wore and Laurel pretended that she was like her mother because she protected herself with knowledge instead of kevlar. Oliver was always the way through, the way inside, the little pinprick reminding her that she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, that she wasn’t as tough, wasn’t as brave, wasn’t as _good_. And maybe Ollie hadn’t changed as much as he pretended he did, because he’d barely been back a few months before he he did the same thing all over again.

Things got complicated. Things got messy. Looking in the mirror afterwards, she remembers being horrified by how much she looked like her father, how much she looked like an out-of-control down-and-out with a problem.

Tommy broke up with her because of Oliver, and she slept with Oliver because it was the only thing she knew how to do, the only thing she’d ever been able to do well. Laurel and Oliver, like it was supposed to be, like she’d always imagined it would be. Laurel and Oliver, together forever; isn’t that what she’d always wanted? Except it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t right, wasn’t good, and when it was over she felt worse than she did before it started; it was a terrible thing, but at least it was easy.

That’s the one thing she could always say about them, about her and Oliver and the thing they kept coming back to. It was always easy, always simple. Even when it was hard, even when it was painful, even when it made her want to scream; even when the world was crashing down all around her, Ollie always made it simple. Black and white, right and wrong, just like her father taught her. Those ideals of his always came clearest when she was looking at them through Oliver’s eyes. She always knew what to feel when she looked at him, always knew what to think, and with Tommy’s words ringing in her ears it was the same familiar easiness that drove her back into his arms all over again.

It’s funny, she thinks, how ‘easy’ and ‘simple’ always seem to dissolve into heartbreak and tragedy whenever Ollie gets involved.

—

So there it is. Not the fairytale of death-defying romance, but a cataclysm of pain and stupidity.

And the worst part is, after everything, Oliver is still alive. Sara’s still dead, down there at the bottom of the ocean, and now Tommy’s dead too, the life shaken out of him by a man-made earthquake, and all she could do was watch the life bleed out of him, watch the Hood slink off into the shadows like the coward her father always told her he was, watch as everything she knew shattered in her hands all over again.

And here she is now. Grieving all over again. Grieving and mourning and hurting, and it’s six years later but nothing has changed. Everyone who ever meant anything to her is dead or slowly killing themselves, but apparently that’s just fine because after all the loss, the grief, the heartbreak, all the injustice, after six years of torture, six years of loss and loneliness and hell, after all of that, at least Oliver Queen is still alive.

It’s not really his fault, she knows, the way things ended with Tommy. It’s not really his fault that she gave in to him, that she let herself be seduced by those bright eyes and that boyish charm one last time. It’s not his fault that she said ‘yes’ when she should’ve said ‘no’, and it sure as hell wasn’t his fault that she wanted it just as desperately as he did that night. It wasn’t his fault that Tommy died without ever knowing the truth, wasn’t his fault that she let it happen; he couldn’t have known what would happen in the Glades, couldn’t have known that she would be there, that Tommy would come after her, that—

 _No._ She can’t think about it. She can’t think at all. If she does, she’ll drown, and probably in something a whole lot darker than one of her father’s bottles.

It’s too close right now, too raw, too real. She can still feel his arms around her waist, his fingertips splayed across her ribs, his breath against her lips, tongue against her teeth. She can still see the sunlight reflected in his eyes, his smile, his everything. She still feels too much, too deep and too heavy, and it’s too painful to go back to that night, too painful to remember what happened, to remember how he got there, why he was there in the first place. It’s too damn painful to think at all, and she’s already been through enough pain to last a lifetime. If she lets herself think, lets herself remember, lets herself go down that road…

Well. She’s already seen what lies at the end of it, and it isn’t pretty.

It’s a dangerous road, sure, but more importantly it’s a selfish one. It’s the road that drove her mother to Central City, the road that drove her father to drink, and then to AA meeting after AA meeting, nourishing his own wasted soul while his only surviving daughter cried herself to sleep all alone. It’s the road that leads her away from everyone and everything she ever cared about, that locks her up in a cage and tells her it’s for her own protection. It’s the road that makes her believe that might be true.

She and Dad lost their family together. Dad grieved Sara, mourned his marriage, drank and drowned and did what he had to. He failed to cope, but at least he tried; Laurel didn’t even manage that. She couldn’t process the anger seething inside of her, couldn’t make sense of the wash of feelings, the parts of her that couldn’t forgive Oliver for what he’d done, for what he did with Sara and to her, the parts of her that couldn’t bring themselves to forgive Sara either for her part in that. She couldn’t reconcile the way she was feeling with the way she knew she should, and it was so damn hard to look at her father, think of her mother, run into Moira and Thea Queen on the street and wonder why she couldn’t feel like they did. She felt so alone, guilty and lost, like she was the only one in the world who had ever felt such horrible things. It was black-and-white to Dad, to Mom, even to the Queens; they didn’t need to process anything deeper than _‘our family is less now than it was’_ because that was all that mattered to them. They didn’t know what it was like for someone like her.

It’s different now. She’s still alone, but it’s not because they don’t understand; it’s because they don’t care. Starling City has lost so much, and who’s going to mourn the son of the man who took it all away?

Malcolm Merlyn is dead too. He was the only family Tommy had, and he’s dead too; Laurel can’t even bring herself to hate him for levelling the Glades and killing five hundred and two other people, because all she can think of is that Tommy would have lost his father if he hadn’t lost his life. She knows that it’s wrong to feel that way, that it’s twisted and cruel, but she can’t stop. It doesn’t compare, not even for a second, to the childish simplicity of Oliver and Sara; it’s not even on the same planet, and yet there’s a sick and sordid part of that her feels like it’s a whole lot easier to forget the awful things that Malcolm Merlyn did. It’s so much easier to forget that he’s the one who caused all this pain when all she can think of is that he’s the only person in Starling who would care that his son was dead.

The Merlyns weren’t the only ones to die that night. Laurel knows that. There are five hundred and three fresh new graves being dug out in the suburbs. Shouldn’t that give her a little perspective? Shouldn’t it make her want to do better, to stand up and see the damage for what it is? 

Five hundred and three people died as well. It should put her stupid feelings into perspective. It should serve as a reminder that there are more important things to worry about than another loss for a Lance. It should make her realise that the only thing in the world that matters right now is love and grief and pain, that she should be going to the Glades, doing what she can for the surviving families, that she should be trying to do right by Tommy, trying to do what he would’ve wanted her to.

And it is. Doing good, doing right. It’s what he would want her to do. She knows that too, as surely as she knows her own name, her own heartbeat, as surely as she recognises the rage and the violence seething in her all over again. She knows it’s what he would have wanted, knows it’s an open door to honour his memory. She knows it all. There are five hundred families out there desperate for help, for justice, for her to save the world, but right now she doesn’t care.

Maybe she’ll care tomorrow. Maybe next week she’ll bring herself to shed a tear or two for the mourners and the mourned, for the five hundred others lost that night. Maybe in a month or a year, she’ll remember what it is to feel compassion for her fellow human being, remember the dedication, the call to justice that sent her to law school in the first place. Maybe in another five years she’ll open up another legal aid office and try to do some good. Maybe some day she’ll try to save the world again.

Some day. Maybe. But not today.

Today she’s in an apartment full of ghosts, standing in front of a full-length mirror, staring a woman she doesn’t recognise and wondering how the hell she got here.

A year ago, she was finally starting to think things might get better. She was finally on her way back up, finally crawling her way back to a place big enough that she could stand up without getting knocked back down again. A year ago, it was finally starting to look like she might get her life back, might be able to greet a new day with something other than emptiness and anger, that she might finally be able to recognise the stranger in her mirror. A year ago. But a year’s a long time, and she’s lost count of all the things that have happened since then.

She’s moved on now, but it’s not to somewhere better. It’s somewhere worse, somewhere darker, somewhere that hurts more than she could ever have imagined. It took five years to recover from the _Gambit_ , five years to find herself among the shattered pieces of her family; five years, destroyed in an instant the day Oliver came back, and a year later she doesn’t even know who she is any more. She doesn’t recognise her reflection, doesn’t know how she got here, how she’s feeling, what she’s thinking.

The only thing she knows is loss. Again.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair and it’s not right. It’s not the kind of justice her family deserves, the kind of justice that her father has worked for every day of his life, the kind of justice he taught her to believe in. It’s not justice at all. And maybe that’s enough of a reason for her to be here in a ghost-full apartment instead of out there fighting the good fight like poor dead Tommy would have wanted. Maybe that’s enough of a reason for her to be selfish and calloused, to be empty outside and in. Justice has given up on her, so why the hell shouldn’t she give up on it too?

After all, she thinks, what’s the point in fighting the good fight when it doesn’t help? Isn’t that what the vigilante, the so-called ‘Hood’ claimed to do? Fight the good fight, do the right thing, keep the people safe. So where the hell was he while Tommy lay dying in a half-collapsed building? Where the hell was he when the building came crashing down and buried Tommy with it? Where the hell was he when it mattered?

Running away. That’s where. Big damn hero.

So, then, to hell with it. To hell with fighting the good fight, with doing what’s right. To hell with justice. To hell with always trying to save the world. To hell with it all.

She doesn’t have a problem. That’s her father’s path, not hers. What she has is a whole lot of anger and a whole lot of pain. What she has is a need to forget, a need to stop feeling, a need to stop remembering, a need to _stop_. A couple of hours, a couple of minutes, even a couple of seconds. Is that really so much to ask for after six years of hurt, six years of struggling, six years of clawing at any little spark of sunlight she can find, any little glimmer of hope that’ll get her through one day and into the next, any little flicker of promise that’ll tell her life is worth living, that somewhere along the line something’ll happen that’s so good it’ll make all the bad worthwhile? Is it really so much to ask for, after all that, to just _stop_?

She is so tired. She’s tired of grieving and hurting and mourning, tired of losing the people she loves. She is tired of burying empty coffins, of whispering empty words to empty graveyards, tired of remembering and wishing that she didn’t. She’s tired of the dead coming back to haunt her, tired of not being able to sleep, of seeing Sara in the shadows or remembering Tommy’s touches as the night falls. She’s tired of thinking, tired of feeling, tired of being angry and upset and hateful and bitter and confused, and she is so damn tired of pain.

She’s tired. That’s all. She’s _tired_.

And if that’s a problem, well…

Well, then, to hell with it.

—


End file.
